iPhone UI unsuited to podcast navigation

My SONY car radio is pretty good with AAC and MP3 tunes, but it fails miserably with podcasts. The controls are designed for navigating a 3 minute tune, not a 60 minute podcast. At the very least they needed to have the fast forward accelerate over time.

I was sure Apple wouldn't mess up like that.

Wrong.

graphpaper.com - Scrubbing the iPhone Scrubber

.... the new scrubber bar is almost useless, especially for long tracks like podcasts where it’s impossible to move the playhead any less than a few minutes per hop...

At least there's a chance Apple will fix their dumb mistake in a future update.

Fixing Leopard stacks (via Japan)

I won't be walking the Leopard until 10.5.3, by which time Stacks might actually work out of the box, but I'm still going to make note of this hack:

TidBITS Problem Solving: A Simple Hack To Fix Leopard's Stacks:

...Zen balance is now restored to my Desktop and Dock, and I find myself once again using Stacks to organize my current projects. For smaller folders the single-click access to the stack is surprisingly more convenient than right-clicking was under Tiger. And sorting by date modified makes even large directories useful as stacks, since I usually want to access the most recent files anyway.

It's a really beautiful hack, and to me one of the neatest aspects is that it comes to us from a Japanese Mac fan.

Rumor has it that the Mac is starting to get a following in Japan. If true this will bring a new rush of invention and creativity to the platform.

Google Desktop Search bites the dust

I've posted frequently since January 2005 about various approaches to full text search in Windows XP in general and Outlook 2003 in particular.

My test environment is harsh. GBs of Outlook PST files. GBs of documents. Machine never rests. Hard drive always on the edge of meltdown.

The best solution, by an order of magnitude, was Lookout for Outlook. Fast, stable, and the bugs are manageable. Alas, it conflicted with some other Outlook Add-Ins (that environment reminds me of DOS TSR hell). Lookout also doesn't work in Outlook 2007 and it's definitely not supported anywhere, so I thought I needed to change. That was probably a mistake.

I used Yahoo Desktop Search for a while, but it was increasingly buggy and Yahoo finally abandoned it. It reverted back to X1 but it was even buggier when I tried their version.

Recently I decided Windows Desktop Search was my only option. It was slow and sucked performance, but it did all I needed and it incorporated Lookout's search syntax (see the help file). Unfortunately, my work machine has been possessed lately.

I'd removed about everything I could think of to try to stabilize my system, so it was time to remove WDS and try the only remaining contender Google Desktop Search.

Yech. This is what I wrote when I uninstalled it:

... I don't have enough control over indexing behavior. I don't have enough search syntax control - esp. for outlook tasks vs. email search. It was WAY slow to do a search against my multi-GB Outlook archives. It doesn't treat folders as first class search objects...

So now what do I do? I could buy a MacBook Pro and run XP in a VM, but Spotlight won't search PST files.

I need full text search - esp. of PST files.

I'm going to try Lookout again; I've gotten rid of most of my Outlook plug-ins / add-ins anyway.

Gee whiz, I miss my home OS X machines. I know people complain about Vista, but I'm not a great fan of any Microsoft products at the moment (though my problems, to be fair, may be hardware related). Even my beloved Windows Live Writer is buggier at the 1.0 release than it was in the last two beta versions!

Update 11/16/07: Joe Cheng (see comment) noted I hadn't submitted my WLW bug reports. They're really not awful, but they stood out relative to the perfection of the last beta. One is certainly a bug -- the category/tag names can be truncated randomly (last few characters are missing). The other two I need to prove are really bugs, which is a bit tough since my Dell laptop is definitely flaky.

I'm going to be more careful going forward about what I call a bug ...

Update 11/16/07b: The regressions (bugs) will soon be history. In the meantime don't use the Post to Weblog as Draft feature with Blogger.

The real iMovie '08 is Final Cut Express 4

iMove '08 should have been called iClip 1.0. It clearly wasn't an upgrade from iMovie HD, it was a new product.

At the time I wrote:

Gordon's Tech: Apple's iClip 1.0 (iMovie '08) shaft: what they should have done

...The honorable thing for Apple to have done would have been to provide iMovie HD users with an upgrade path to Final Cut Express (which might also require some updates to FCE, I'm not sure how serious Apple is about that product)...

Well, Apple didn't do the honorable thing for iMovie HD users, but the new Final Cut Express is out. Users of iMovie HD should probably forego the iLife 2008 update and buy FCE 4 instead.

I'd give them points if they were to provide a $100 upgrade path for users of iMovie HD, but I admit that would pretty hard to police. The new product is $200, so heavy users of iMovie HD will probably pay up.

Safari 3: very cool tech

Safari 3 is even more impressive than I'd realized: Surfin’ Safari: Ten New Things in WebKit 3.

Faster - esp. JavaScript. Less memory. More capabilities. Fewer bugs. SVG support (not fully optimized).

I'm going to test it with Blogger and Google Docs, Safari 3 beta didn't work too well there.

OS X 10.4.11: Macintouch reports and an update procedure

My policy on these bug fix updates is to wait a few days and check both the Macintouch Reader Reports: OS X 10.4.11 and the Apple Discussion List.

I follow a simple subset of Gruber's update procedure:

1. Download the full cumulative update from Apple's site.
2. Shut down and disconnect all external drives.
3. Restart into my admin account (very plain account).
4. Install update, don't run anything until it's done.
5. Restart into my regular account.

I don't do an extra backup but I do check that my nightly backup completed correctly. If I'm feeling paranoid I do a test restore of a single randomly selected file.

There has been a longstanding bug with Apple's Updater (note, however, I have removed unsanity's application program enhancer from all my machines). There's a low but non-zero probability that it will botch an update; the probability rises sharply if you're doing anything during the update process or if another users is logged on at the same time. The restart reduces that risk substantially, as does the plain admin account.

I don't repair privileges. Everyone I read feels that's pointless.

Since I have no recognized problems with OS X 10.4.10 I'm in no great hurry to update*.

*iPhoto 7.1 is crashy. I hope the combination of 10.4.11 and iPhoto 7.11 will help.

Update 11/15/07: Some hints in Apple's release notes and user experiences suggest 10.4.11 may have the same trouble with input manager hacks (application program enhancer mostly) as 10.5 has. I recommend checking for APE as described in the APE uninstall guidelines. Then uninstall it.

After the update, if you absolutely can't live without APE, do your research prior to reinstalling the very latest version.

Bento and the iPhone

FileMaker has discontinued FileMaker Mobile

As of the end of the business day, December 19, 2007, FileMaker, Inc. will no longer sell FileMaker Mobile.

That's a serious drag, because a database client for the iPhone is one of my high priority requirements.

On the other hand, FM has introduced the mysterious 10.5 only Bento "personal database" app:

Meet Bento — Learn More

... Bento is designed exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It takes advantage of many of the new features of Leopard, including live linking to iCal data, core animation, advanced find, Time Machine backups, and multimedia features...

So will there by a companion iPhone application for Bento?

In the meantime, I'll be holding off on FileMaker updates. In fact, I'll be holding off on all Apple purchases until I see the iPhone SDK and the rumored major iPhone update in Feb 2008. Apple's strategy is simply murky ...